Data, Culture and the Ambivalence of Algorithms

Humans have long defined, assessed, analysed and calculated data as factors in how they navigate reality. Indeed, the rules for what constitute data, together with the logics of their assembly, make up a core component of culture. Whether they be omens or numbers, whether they are qualitative or quantitative, whether they involve heuristics, hermeneutics or the rules of mathematics, the dyad of data and their organizing schemes give cultural eras their specificity. Considering developments ranging from Mayan astronomical calendars to Copernicus’s heliocentric observations, from seventeenth-century navigational charts to twentieth-century actuarial tables, one might say that this dyad underpins cultural possibility